Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

If you've ever fixed a bug only to watch it come back two weeks later, you already understand why root cause analysis matters. Patching symptoms feels productive - it's not. Getting to the actual cause is what prevents the same issue from eating your team's time over and over again. This guide covers everything you need to know about root cause analysis (RCA) in software testing: what it is, how to do it, which tools help, and where AI is taking it next.

Dozens of startups are sprinting to build the next “agentic SIEM” that can autonomously detect, investigate, and respond to threats. They’re well-funded, well-marketed, but structurally hollow. Here’s what it usually looks like: an LLM layer on top of a thin orchestration engine on top of fragmented or customer-hosted data lakes. While it looks impressive in a demo, it quickly falls apart in production. Why? It’s not built on a strong foundation.

For years, enterprises have chased the promise of artificial intelligence as a remedy for growing operational complexity. It seemed logical that if environments were expanding faster than teams could keep up, smarter models could fill the gap. But early deployments of generic AI proved a difficult truth. Intelligence alone does not create operational clarity. It does not guarantee safety.

No one wants to stare at a plant and guess if it needs water. It’s much easier if the plant can say, “I’m thirsty.” A few years ago, we built Plant Buddy using InfluxDB Cloud 2.0. The linked article is still a great guide for cloud-first IoT prototyping as it shows how quickly you can connect devices, store time series data, and build dashboards in the cloud with the previous version of InfluxDB. But this time, the goal was different.

When we started building Checkly's uptime monitoring suite, the goal was to give engineering teams complete visibility across every layer of their stack, from application down to network, in one place. URL, TCP, DNS, and Heartbeat monitors covered a lot of that ground. But one fundamental piece was missing: the ability to simply ping a host and know if it's reachable.